Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is currently under way, and as usual, the technical fellows at Microsoft gave speeches about the deep architecture of Windows - in this case, Windows 7 of course. As it turns out, quite some seriously impressive changes have been made to the very core of Windows - all without breaking a single application. Thanks to BetaNews for summarising this technical talk so well.

Just for the record, previous OSes did not suffer from deadlocks in the scheduler like they article implies. When the number of locks increase, though, more discipline is required to ensure that no lock inversion deadlocks can arise. A new careful hierarchy had to be instituted to avoid this (and the code has a lot of self-checks to enforce correct ordering).